Tin Can Courage: The Last Stand of USS Samuel B. Roberts

Prologue: Dawn off Samar

October 25, 1944. 6:58 a.m.
Samar Island, Philippines.

The Philippine Sea was calm, the sky streaked with the first light of morning. Aboard the USS Samuel B. Roberts, 224 sailors prepared for another day escorting American carriers off Samar. They had been together for just five months and twenty-seven days since commissioning—ordinary men on an extraordinary ship.

Then, through the haze, lookouts spotted four Japanese battleships, fifteen miles northwest. Towering above all was Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, her nine 18.1-inch guns capable of firing shells weighing 3,200 pounds over 25 miles. Behind her steamed three more battleships, eight cruisers, and a swarm of destroyers—twenty-three warships, two hundred thousand tons of steel, closing at thirty knots.

Lieutenant Commander Robert Copeland picked up the intercom. He told his crew the truth: “Survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can.”

Chapter 1: Against All Odds

The math was grim. The American task force—six escort carriers designed to fight submarines, screened by three destroyers and four destroyer escorts—totaled just twenty-five thousand tons. The Japanese outweighed them eight to one.

Admiral William Halsey had taken every American battleship north overnight, chasing Japanese carriers. Taffy 3 was alone. Intelligence had reported the Japanese center force retreating after air attacks. They weren’t retreating. At 3:00 a.m., they slipped through San Bernardino Strait undetected.

Now, the escort carriers couldn’t outrun battleships. Doctrine called for destroyer escorts to screen convoys from submarines, not charge battleships. In the previous three months, Japanese naval forces had sunk four American escort carriers. Survival rate for carrier crews in surface actions was forty percent—twelve hundred sailors dead in those engagements.

At 7:05 a.m., Admiral Clifton Sprague ordered his screen to attack. Three destroyers turned toward the enemy: Johnston, Hoel, and Heermann. Behind them came four destroyer escorts. Roberts was last in line. Minutes remained before Japanese guns opened fire.

Chapter 2: Speed is Life

Below decks, Chief Engineer Lieutenant Lloyd Trowbridge heard Copeland’s announcement. Navy regulations limited Roberts to twenty-four knots. Safety mechanisms prevented the boilers from exceeding design specifications.

Trowbridge walked to the main control panel and began bypassing every safety system the Navy had installed. His crew watched in silence. Twenty-four knots would not be enough.

At 7:16 a.m., Johnston opened fire. Shells arced toward the Japanese fleet. The enemy returned fire immediately—fourteen-inch shells from battleship Kongō. Water columns erupted two hundred feet high. The destroyer disappeared into smoke.

At 7:23 a.m., Roberts turned toward the enemy. Copeland ordered flank speed. Trowbridge’s modifications pushed the escort to twenty-eight knots, four knots faster than design specs. Metal groaned, steam pressure gauges climbed into the red. Nobody cared. Speed was life.

The Japanese fleet spread across ten miles of ocean. Yamato steamed in the center. Heavy cruiser Chikuma led the right flank, eight miles ahead. Cruiser Tone followed two miles behind. To the left, cruisers Haguro and Chōkai closed on the American carriers. Between them, destroyers formed a screen.

Roberts had to penetrate that screen, reach torpedo range, fire, escape. Torpedo range was five thousand yards—2.8 miles. Her three Mark 15 torpedoes could travel that distance at forty-six knots. But getting within five thousand yards meant running through a gauntlet of shells from ships that could hit targets at twenty-five thousand yards.

Chapter 3: Into the Storm

At 7:32 a.m., shells began falling around Roberts—eight-inch rounds from Chikuma. Green dye markers in the splashes helped Japanese spotters track their aim. One shell landed fifty yards off the port bow. Another struck twenty yards to starboard. Water columns towered over the mast.

Copeland ordered hard left rudder, then hard right—zigzag pattern. Keep the enemy guessing. Make their rangefinders work.

Gun Captain Lieutenant William Burton stood in the forward five-inch gun mount. His crew had trained for six months, fired thousands of practice rounds, never against battleships. The forward gun could fire fifteen rounds per minute with a trained crew. Burton had 608 rounds of ammunition—304 per gun. At maximum rate, that gave him twenty minutes of continuous fire.

Burton’s gun crew: ten men, average age twenty-two. Two had never seen combat before today. The other eight had fought submarines. This was different. Submarines didn’t shoot back with fourteen-inch guns.

At 7:38 a.m., Copeland announced they were closing for torpedo attack. Roberts was seven thousand yards from Chikuma—still too far. Copeland needed to close another two thousand yards. Two more minutes at twenty-eight knots. Two more minutes of shells falling around the ship.

One direct hit from an eight-inch shell would penetrate Roberts’ thin hull plating, detonate inside, kill everyone in that compartment. The forward gun mount had three-eighths-inch steel plating, designed to stop shrapnel, not eight-inch shells. If a shell hit the mount directly, all ten men inside would die instantly.

Chapter 4: Torpedoes Away

At 7:40 a.m., Roberts crossed five thousand yards from Chikuma—torpedo range. Copeland ordered the tubes fired. Three Mark 15 torpedoes launched from the starboard side. White wakes traced across the water at forty-six knots. Travel time to target: two minutes.

The torpedoes ran hot, straight, and normal. Roberts immediately reversed course, hard left rudder, full speed away, disappearing into a smoke screen.

Chikuma’s lookout spotted the torpedo wakes. The cruiser turned hard to port, emergency maneuver. Her rudder went to maximum angle, eight thousand tons of warship heeled over. The first torpedo passed fifty yards ahead of her bow. The second missed the stern. The third ran underneath without detonating—contact exploders on Mark 15 torpedoes had a forty percent failure rate.

Roberts had just fired three duds, but Copeland had achieved something more valuable than a hit. Chikuma had turned away from the carriers, broken off her attack run. She’d lost five minutes of pursuit time—five minutes the escort carriers could use to run south, five minutes closer to possible rescue.

Chapter 5: David vs Goliath

At 7:45 a.m., Roberts emerged from the smoke screen. Chikuma had completed her turn and resumed course toward the carriers, now eight thousand yards away—too far for another torpedo run.

Copeland ordered Burton to open fire with the forward five-inch gun. The mount rotated toward the target, elevated to maximum range. Fired. The first shell left the barrel at 2,600 feet per second, landed four hundred yards short. Burton adjusted elevation, fired again—two hundred yards short. Third shot, near Chikuma’s bow. Fourth shot hit, penetrating the forward superstructure, detonating inside. Smoke poured from the impact point.

Burton’s crew settled into a rhythm: load, ram, fire. Fifteen rounds per minute. The gun barrel heated, recoil mechanism cycled, brass casings piled up. After five minutes of continuous fire, Burton had expended seventy-five rounds. He had hits on Chikuma—couldn’t tell how much damage.

At 7:52 a.m., Chikuma shifted fire from the carriers to Roberts. Eight-inch shells landed close, very close. One exploded thirty yards to port—shrapnel peppered the hull. Another landed twenty yards to starboard—blast wave rocked the ship. A third hit ten yards off the bow—splash drenched the forward gun mount. Sea water poured through the gunports. Burton’s crew kept firing. Water slushed around their feet. The gun mechanism was designed to work wet. Destroyers operated in all weather, all sea states.

This wasn’t simulation. This was combat. And the Japanese were getting their range.

Chapter 6: The Tin Can Fights Back

At 8:03 a.m., destroyer Johnston took a hit from Kongō—fourteen-inch shell, direct impact on her bridge. The explosion killed her executive officer, wounded her captain. Johnston’s speed dropped to seventeen knots. Steering control shifted to aft steering. The destroyer continued firing.

Three miles north, destroyer Hoel engaged heavy cruiser Haguro. Hoel had already taken multiple hits. Her forward gun mount was destroyed, number three engine room flooded. She was making fifteen knots on one engine.

Roberts was still intact, still making twenty-eight knots, still firing at Chikuma, but ammunition was running low. After eighteen minutes of continuous fire, Burton had expended 270 rounds from the forward gun—ninety percent of that mount’s ammunition. Thirty-four rounds remained. At the current rate, two minutes and sixteen seconds before the forward gun ran dry.

At 8:07 a.m., Copeland ordered Burton to shift fire to a new target—heavy cruiser Tone, closed to seven thousand yards. Tone mounted eight eight-inch guns, firing at escort carrier Gambier Bay. Shells were landing near the carrier, getting closer with each salvo.

Burton traversed his gun mount, elevated for seven thousand yards, fired. The shell arced toward Tone, landed short. Adjusted, fired again—hit. The shell struck Tone’s number two turret, penetrated the armored face, detonated inside. The turret stopped rotating, stopped firing. Burton had just disabled one quarter of the cruiser’s main battery with a five-inch gun not supposed to damage cruisers.

At 8:10 a.m., Roberts’ forward gun fired its last round—304 rounds expended. The barrel was scorching hot, metal glowed dull red. The recoil mechanism was starting to fail. Springs compressed beyond design limits, oil smoking in the recuperator. Burton’s crew had pushed the gun past every Navy specification. Now they were done. The forward mount had no more ammunition.

Chapter 7: Paul Carr’s Last Shell

The aft gun mount, under Gunner’s Mate Third Class Paul Henry Carr, still had ammunition—325 rounds. Carr was twenty years old, from Checotah, Oklahoma. He joined the Navy in May 1942, trained as a gunner at Great Lakes, assigned to Roberts in April, six months ago. This was his first surface action.

His gun crew: ten men, average age twenty-one. They’d been firing continuously since 7:45—twenty-five minutes, 324 rounds expended. One round remaining.

At 8:15 a.m., Roberts’ luck ran out. Three Japanese heavy cruisers had her bracketed: Chikuma to the north, Tone to the northeast, Haguro to the northwest. They were closing—six thousand yards, five thousand, four thousand. Roberts was running out of sea room, smoke, and time.

At 8:20 a.m., an eight-inch shell from Chikuma struck Roberts amidships, port side. The shell penetrated the thin hull plating, traveled through the galley, exited starboard without detonating, punched a hole three feet wide. Seawater began flooding lower decks. Damage control teams rushed to seal the breach, stuffed mattresses into holes, shored up buckled bulkheads. Roberts took on a five-degree list to port.

Two minutes later, a second shell hit—this one detonated. The explosion tore through the crew’s berthing compartment, killed six men instantly, ruptured steam lines. Superheated steam filled the passageway, scalded four more sailors. Roberts’ speed dropped to twenty-four knots, then twenty. One boiler was offline. Trowbridge fought to keep the other running.

At 8:25 a.m., Carr’s aft gun mount lost electrical power. The power train that rotated the mount stopped. The hydraulic ram that loaded shells stopped. The firing mechanism went dead. The mount was now manually operated.

Carr’s crew had trained for this. Every destroyer escort crew trained for combat damage. They knew how to operate the gun without power—it just took longer. Manual operation required muscle. The trainer and pointer hand-cranked the mount to aim. The loader and rammer manually lifted each fifty-four-pound shell, rammed it into the breech by hand. The gun captain manually triggered the firing pin. Rate of fire dropped from fifteen rounds per minute to six, maybe seven if the crew was fast. Carr’s crew was fast.

They kept firing, cranked the mount toward Tone, loaded a shell, rammed it home, fired. The recoil mechanism absorbed eight tons of backward force. The mount shook, deck plates bent. Load another shell. Ram, fire. Six rounds per minute. The gun barrel was glowing red. Heat radiated through the mount—temperature inside reached 130°F.

The crew was soaking wet—sweat, seawater from near misses, steam from ruptured lines below decks.

Chapter 8: The Cost of Valor

At 8:30 a.m., disaster struck the aft mount. A powder charge cooked off—spontaneous ignition from the overheated breech. The explosion tore through the gun mount, killed three men instantly, wounded seven others. Shrapnel shredded the interior. The blast threw Carr backward against the bulkhead. A jagged piece of steel caught him from neck to groin, ripped him open. He fell, landed on the deck. His intestines were exposed. He was dying.

But Carr wasn’t finished. He looked at the ammunition rack. One shell remained—the last round in the magazine. He crawled toward it, grabbed it. Fifty-four pounds. He couldn’t lift it alone, couldn’t stand. He held the shell against his chest. Blood poured from the wound. He looked at the breech, looked at his crew. They had to load this shell. Had to keep firing.

Machinist Mate Second Class Chalmer Goheen found Carr holding the shell, begging to load it. Goheen took the shell, tried to help Carr away from the destroyed mount. Carr refused to move. He kept pointing at the breech, kept trying to make Goheen understand—load the shell, fire the gun, keep fighting.

Goheen set the shell down, dragged Carr away from the mount. The gun was destroyed, the breech shattered, the firing mechanism gone. There was no way to fire that last shell. Carr didn’t understand. Or maybe he understood and didn’t care. He died five minutes later, still trying to get back to his gun.

Chapter 9: Sinking and Survival

At 8:35 a.m., Roberts took another hit—fourteen-inch shell, either from Kongō or Haruna. The massive shell struck the starboard side, penetrated the number two engine room, detonated inside. The explosion tore a hole forty feet long and ten feet wide in the hull. Seawater rushed in. The engine room flooded in thirty seconds. Eight men were killed instantly. Roberts’ speed dropped to ten knots, then five, then dead in the water.

Copeland ordered all remaining crew topside. The ship was dying—no power, no steering, three feet of water in the lower decks, fires burning in four compartments. Roberts was settling by the stern, going down.

At 8:45 a.m., more shells hit—six-inch rounds from light cruiser Noshiro, eight-inch rounds from Haguro. The Japanese were pounding the helpless escort. Each hit killed more men, wounded more. Roberts had become a stationary target.

At 9:10 a.m., Copeland gave the order to abandon ship. One hundred fifteen men were already dead or missing. The remaining 109 sailors began going over the side. They had three inflatable life rafts—two destroyed by shellfire, one remained, designed to hold sixteen men. The wounded went in the raft. Everyone else into the water.

Three floater nets drifted nearby. Men clung to them, held on to anything that floated—debris, empty shell casings, wooden planks.

At 9:35 a.m., Roberts rolled to port. Her bow rose out of the water, pointed at the sky. The stern was already underwater. She hung there for ten seconds, then slipped beneath the surface—stern first, bow following. Three hundred six feet of warship disappeared into the Philippine Sea. She sank in six hundred fathoms—3,600 feet deep, the deepest any American warship had been sunk in combat.

Chapter 10: Adrift

One hundred nine men were in the water. Many wounded—burns, shrapnel, broken bones. All covered in fuel oil—thick black crude from Roberts’ ruptured tanks. The oil coated everything, got in eyes, mouths, lungs. Some men vomited, others were unconscious.

Water temperature was eighty-four degrees—warm enough to survive for a while. No food, no fresh water, no rescue in sight. The battle still raged nearby. Japanese warships steamed past. None stopped to pick them up.

At 9:45 a.m., Admiral Takeo Kurita ordered the Japanese center force to withdraw. His cruisers had taken heavy damage from destroyers and aircraft. Chōkai was dead in the water. Chikuma was on fire. Suzuya’s torpedoes had exploded from a near miss. Kumano’s bow had been blown off by a torpedo. Three heavy cruisers critically damaged.

Kurita believed he was fighting fleet carriers and heavy cruisers. His staff insisted they were engaging Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet. They were wrong. The escort carriers of Taffy 3 were Liberty ship hulls with flight decks. The destroyers were tin cans with five-inch guns. Confusion saved the American invasion fleet. The Japanese turned north, headed back toward San Bernardino Strait. The battle off Samar was over.

Three American ships had been sunk—destroyer escort Samuel B. Roberts, destroyers Johnston and Hoel. Escort carrier Gambier Bay had capsized under fire from Yamato’s eighteen-inch guns. 1,277 American sailors were dead or missing, another 1,000 wounded. But the invasion fleet survived. MacArthur’s troops continued landing. Supplies flowed ashore. The Japanese had lost their last chance to stop the Philippine campaign.

Chapter 11: The Ordeal

In the water off Samar, 109 survivors from Roberts drifted. The battle moved away, then out of sight. Silence settled over the ocean—no engines, no gunfire, just waves lapping against life jackets.

The men clustered around the single life raft and two floater nets. The wounded were in the raft. Everyone else held on to the edges or clung to the nets or floated nearby in life jackets. They spread out over a quarter mile of ocean—small groups, two men, five men, ten—trying to stay together, trying not to drift apart.

The fuel oil was the worst part. It coated skin, hair, faces. Getting it in eyes caused temporary blindness, burning pain. Getting it in mouths caused vomiting, retching. Some men couldn’t stop vomiting, grew weaker each hour—dehydrated.

The sun rose higher. Temperature climbed above ninety degrees. No shade, no water, no food. The wounded suffered. Burns infected within hours in the tropical heat. Open wounds exposed to seawater, fuel oil, bacteria.

At 2 p.m. on October 25th, sharks arrived—small ones at first, six feet long, blacktip reef sharks. They circled the survivors, bumped into men, investigating, testing. One sailor removed his oil-soaked clothes to swim easier—a bad decision. Exposed white skin caught a shark’s attention. It nudged his leg harder. The man panicked, climbed back onto the floater net, cut his hands on the rough rope.

Later, larger sharks appeared—eight feet, ten feet. Tiger sharks, bull sharks. They came closer, more aggressive, more interested. Survivors couldn’t confirm if sharks killed anyone, but two men disappeared during the first night—just gone. Others heard splashing, thrashing, then silence. Nobody wanted to think about what that meant.

Night brought cold—relative cold. Water temperature dropped to seventy-eight degrees. Not dangerous, but uncomfortable. After twelve hours immersed, men shivered. Hypothermia set in for the wounded. Three more died during the first night—wounds, shock, exposure. Their bodies were pushed away from the raft, drifted off into darkness, disappeared.

October 26th brought more sun, more heat. Dehydration was critical. Some men hallucinated, seeing ships that weren’t there, land on the horizon, rescue planes. Others were unconscious, lips cracked and bleeding, tongues swollen. Five more died on the second day. Their bodies joined the others, drifting away into the Philippine Sea.

Copeland kept his men together, kept them talking, kept them awake. Falling asleep meant death—slipping under the water, drowning. He organized survivors into groups, assigned leaders, made them count off every hour. Anyone who didn’t respond got checked, shaken awake, kept in the group.

Fourteen men died over three days, but ninety-five survived because Copeland refused to let them give up.

Chapter 12: Rescue and Legacy

At 7:45 a.m. on October 27th, a patrol craft spotted the survivors. PC 1119 was escorting five landing craft infantry north of Samar. The lookout saw something in the water—wreckage, bodies, life jackets.

The patrol craft approached cautiously—Japanese survivors were known to play dead, attack rescuers. The PC stopped fifty yards away, called out, asked who won the World Series. An American voice yelled back, “St. Louis Cardinals.”

The patrol craft moved in. Rescue took four hours. Ninety-five men pulled from the water. Fifty hours after Roberts sank, some couldn’t walk, couldn’t stand, had to be carried aboard.

All were treated for dehydration, burns, wounds, infections, fuel oil poisoning. The most serious cases went to hospital ship Comfort, sailed to Hollandia. The rest went to Leyte, then to San Francisco aboard transport Lurline. They arrived December 4th, three weeks before Christmas.

Epilogue: The Finest Hour

The battle off Samar became known as the greatest last stand in naval history. Seven small ships turned back twenty-three warships, saved an entire invasion fleet, prevented a disaster that could have prolonged the Pacific War by months.

Admiral Chester Nimitz called it the Navy’s finest hour. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that no engagement in naval history showed more gallantry.

Roberts received the Presidential Unit Citation. Copeland received the Navy Cross. Paul Carr received the Silver Star posthumously.

In 1985, the Navy commissioned guided missile frigate USS Carr, named for the gunner who died holding his last shell. In 1982, frigate USS Copeland was commissioned, named for the captain who led his crew into impossible odds.

In June 2022, explorer Victor Vescovo found the Roberts—22,621 feet down, 4.3 miles, the deepest shipwreck ever discovered, deeper than Titanic. The wreck sits upright, bow separated from stern by impact but recognizable. The aft gun mount where Carr died is still there, visible in the footage, silent, waiting.

The last survivor, Alfred Lenore, died March 20th, 2022, age ninety-seven—three months before they found his ship.

That’s the story of the destroyer escort that fought like a battleship. The tiny ship that charged Yamato. The crew that refused to surrender, even when survival was impossible.